value proposition and notch up quick wins, he
ensured positive adoption within the company.
The team made presentations that explained
why the legal department was conducting the
project and what changes to expect.

The team also reviewed the terms with
customers. “Feedback from customers indicates
that the new terms and conditions feel more
like technology-company terms and less like
those of a legacy telecommunications company.
This was a major win for the legal department,”
Veilleux says.

That success helped the team get buy-in for
the Global Master Terms transformation project,
which took over a year and represented “a
magnitude of difference,” Veilleux says. Verizon
Enterprise Solutions operates in more than

70 countries around the world and must be
compliant with a dizzying number of local legal
and regulatory requirements. Nine different
master contracts had been generated by the
divergent, and somewhat fragmented, regions.

Far from being overwhelmed by the project,They coordinated withattorneys on five continentsrepresenting all those countries,collaborating via two-hourconference calls, twice a week,for more than a year. Again, adata-driven approach informedthe process, as the team useddata from the InternationalAssociation for Contract andCommercial Management tolearn what terms are mostlikely to contribute to contractdisputes. They also reached out to the litiga-tion department to talk about risk from ashareholder perspective.

The company will soon roll out a single,
eight-page global contract that works across
all Verizon services, for all customers, in all
geographies. Its new master service agreement
framework features a contract with a simple
narrative structure:

• Here’s what we offer and how we offer it

• Here’s how you can buy it and for how long

• Here are our collective remedies for
non-performance

• Here are our core legal terms.

“Previously, contracts were a melting pot of
ideas,” Jones says. For the transformation,
they took a different tack: Be Your Customer.
“Understanding why customers were coming to
Verizon creates a better narrative and a different
emotional experience for the customer.”

• “Purposeful contracting” is catchy; like how they reducedservice terms by 70 percent and racked up impressivesavings• Many companies struggle to rationalize contracting. This is agreat, customer-centric model